Bought and Sold Page 18

  When I went for my session with the psychiatrist the next day, he asked me all the usual questions, told me he was very pleased with the progress I had made, and then said, ‘I don’t know exactly what’s been going on; what I do know is that you’re in trouble. I’m not going to ask you to talk about things you don’t want to talk about, but we want to help you. You understand that, don’t you?’

  He handed me a tissue, and after I had wiped away my tears, I nodded my head.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘So just answer yes or no to this question: do you need our help?’

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered.

  ‘Good.’ He sounded genuinely relieved. ‘Well, you need to leave Greece. It isn’t safe for you to stay here. Is there anyone in England who could look after you?’

  He already knew my mum lived with Nikos on the coast. ‘I’ve got grandparents in England,’ I told him. ‘They live near London. I don’t know their phone number, but Mum will have it. They would take care of me; I’m sure they would.’ As I said it, an image flashed into my mind of me as a little girl sitting at the kitchen table in my grandparents’ house, looking at a book with my grandfather. I think I had accepted the fact that I wouldn’t ever see him or my grandmother again. And now, suddenly, it was a possibility I was desperate to cling to.

  ‘Right. In that case, I need to speak to your mother first.’ He pressed the heels of his hands on to the desk for a moment, then reached for the phone.

  For as long as I can remember, certainly ever since I was a very little girl, my body’s reaction to extreme anxiety has been to shake. It’s quite embarrassing sometimes, because it isn’t just gentle shuddering; it’s quite noticeable, and totally beyond my control. I was shaking as I sat listening to the doctor talk to my mum, because I knew that something had been set in motion that could make everything either better or considerably worse than it had ever been.

  When I was admitted to the hospital, I hadn’t wanted Mum to know what had happened, so I had asked them not to contact her. It hadn’t been difficult keeping up the pretence – in texts and occasionally phone calls – that everything was going well for me, particularly once I had begun to feel safe at the hospital. After all, I had managed it when I wasn’t safe and was working as a prostitute. So I knew it was going to be a huge shock for Mum to hear the truth now. In fact, all the doctor told her was that I had been sectioned after trying to take my own life and that he believed me to be in great danger in Athens. Mum obviously couldn’t take in what he was saying at first and he had to repeat some of it and keep reassuring her that I was all right.

  When she finally accepted what he was telling her, the doctor said, ‘Your daughter says she has grandparents in England who would look after her. If we let her leave the hospital and can get her to where you are, would you be willing and able to take her back to England?’ Mum must have said she would. ‘In that case,’ the doctor continued, ‘I need to speak to Megan’s grandparents. So if you could let me have their phone number …’

  Before he hung up the phone, I talked to my mum too, just to tell her that I really was okay and that I would explain everything when I saw her. Then, after the doctor had spoken to my grandfather and told him much the same thing as he had told my mother, he handed the phone to me again. Although I had learned long ago to hold back the tears when I spoke to my mum, I hadn’t heard my granddad’s voice for years, and I was crying so much I doubt whether he could understand most of what I was saying. It must have been even more of a shock for him than for my mum, getting a phone call like that out of the blue. He sounded bemused, but kept reassuring me – as he had already assured the doctor – that he and my grandmother would do whatever was required to help me when I got back to England.

  Later that same day, one of the nurses told me, ‘We’re going to need your passport. Do you know where it is?’

  ‘It’s in the apartment I was staying in,’ I lied. ‘I could ask my friend to pick it up and bring it with him next time he comes.’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ she said, and although her expression didn’t change, I don’t think she was fooled for a moment.

  When Christoph phoned, I asked him to bring in my passport when he visited me the next day. ‘The people at the hospital are asking for it,’ I said. ‘They need it for my records. I told them it was in the apartment and that I would ask you to bring it in.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say you had lost it?’ he demanded angrily. ‘For God’s sake, Megan, do you never learn anything?’ But he must have realised it was already too late and that failing to produce it now might lead to questions and complications that, from his point of view, were best avoided. ‘I’ll bring it tomorrow,’ he said, forcing himself to speak pleasantly again. ‘And I’ll bring some nice food for you as well.’

  When Christoph came to see me the next day, we walked around the grounds, as we had done many times before on all the occasions when it had been nice just to have a visitor. This time, though, I couldn’t wait for him to leave. The nurses were as coolly polite to him as they always were, but my paranoia seemed to have gone into overdrive and I kept thinking, ‘What if he can read my thoughts?’ So when he told me he was going to be busy and wouldn’t be able to come to see me again for a couple of days, my immediate thought was that it was a trick and he just wanted to see how I would react. Fortunately, I managed to answer him calmly – thanks, in part at least, to the tablets I was taking.

  It seems ridiculous now to say that I had mixed feelings as I stood in the hallway and watched Christoph walk away that day. When he stopped in the doorway and turned around to wave, I had to hold my breath to stop myself bursting into tears. As soon as he had gone, I gave my passport to one of the hospital staff.

  The next morning, a nurse helped me to pack my bag with the few items of clothing Christoph had brought in for me over the last few weeks. Odd though it may sound, I was very sad to be leaving the hospital. In the three months I had spent there, not a single person had said anything harsh, critical or unkind to me. (Being told to ‘eff off’ by the old lady didn’t count, because there was never any malice in it when she said it and I knew she didn’t mean it.) I didn’t know what was going to happen next, and the thought of being on the other side of the wall that surrounded the hospital grounds and kept everything inside it safe was very daunting and frightening.

  Later that morning, a nurse and a male member of the hospital staff took me by car to the coach station in the centre of Athens, where they bought me a ticket to the coastal town where my mother lived with Nikos. Even though they stood close beside me all the time, I couldn’t stop myself looking round nervously every few seconds, expecting to see Christoph’s face amongst the crowd, or someone else watching me, waiting to see which coach I got on.

  Then my coach was there with its door open and it was time for me to leave. I cried as the nurse hugged me and wished me good luck. ‘This is for you,’ she said, handing me a bracelet. ‘The symbol on it is a Turkish eye. It’s supposed to ward off evil. Be safe, Megan. And may God protect you.’ If I hadn’t known that my mum would be waiting for me at the end of my journey, I don’t know if I would have been able to get on the coach. But I did get on it, and as I sat waiting for the driver to close the door and start the engine, I tried to concentrate on taking one breath after another and suppressing the panic that was threatening to engulf me.

  I had been dreading the long journey from Athens to the coast, and it was every bit as bad as I had imagined it would be. I couldn’t relax, even for a moment. I flinched every time someone passed me on their way down the aisle to use the toilet at the back of the bus, and had to force myself not to keep turning round to see if any of the other passengers were looking at me. And then I began to worry in case the tablets I was taking might have stopped working, and my paranoia would just keep building up and up until it tipped me over the edge into some sort of manic episode.

  I had thought for a long time that I was suffering from paranoia – even befo
re I tried to kill myself and ended up in a mental hospital. In fact, I continued to think so until fairly recently, when I looked it up. One of the definitions for the word paranoia is ‘an irrational or delusional thought process’, another is ‘the belief that other people are trying to do you harm even though there’s no convincing evidence that that is the case’, and another ‘the unfounded fear that something bad is going to happen and that other people are responsible for this’. So perhaps it never really was paranoia after all, because most of my fears weren’t delusional or unfounded. When you’ve been physically and mentally abused on a daily basis for years, there’s plenty of ‘convincing evidence’ that people are trying to do you harm, which means that the fears I had were perfectly rational. It’s some small comfort, I suppose.

  As I sat on the coach that day, I felt excited as well as anxious and frightened, because I was going to see my mum again, for only the second time in six long years. It was after midnight when the coach turned into the station. I saw Mum as soon as the door opened, and I stumbled down the steps, dropped my bag on the ground and ran towards her. We were both crying as we threw our arms around each other. Then Mum held me away from her so that she could look at me, and I could tell that she was shocked and upset by what she saw. ‘What happened to you?’ she asked me. ‘I don’t understand, Megan. I thought you were doing so well in Athens. I thought you were happy. Come on, let’s go home.’

  As we walked together through the almost-deserted streets to the apartment she lived in with Nikos, she asked me again, ‘What happened to you. Megan?’ But what could I tell her when I didn’t really understand it myself? Even then, I was still clinging to the belief that Jak had loved me and that, in some inexplicable way, everything that had occurred had been the result of a horrible mistake and not what he had intended when I was 14 years old and we had first gone to Athens together.

  Nikos was waiting for us when we arrived at the apartment. He looked strained and anxious, and as he put his arms around me he began to cry. I had tried so many times to imagine what my life might have been like during those lost years if I had stayed in that little town on the coast, close to Mum and Nikos. Now that I was back there, I kept thinking I might suddenly wake up and find that I wasn’t.

  All Mum and Nikos knew was what the doctor had told Mum on the phone – that I had tried to kill myself and that they had been treating me for anxiety and depression. I hadn’t slept on the coach for more than a few minutes at a time and I was exhausted. So we didn’t talk much that night. What I did tell them, though, was that from the time I had moved to Athens with Jak, I had been working as a prostitute.

  ‘But the photographs …’ Mum crossed her arms, hugging herself tightly, and bent forward for a moment. ‘You were always smiling in the photographs,’ she said, sitting upright again. ‘You looked so happy.’

  ‘They were all faked,’ I told her.

  It was really difficult telling them the truth. For six years they had believed that I had made a success of my life in Athens and I hated disappointing them – and humiliating myself. I think Mum was so shocked by what I was saying that she couldn’t really take it in. Nikos understood it though, and he put his head in his hands and sobbed. Then suddenly he stood up, sending the little coffee table skidding across the tiled floor, and shouted angrily, ‘Jak did this thing to you! He comes to my bar and talks to me like a friend knowing what he has done to you!’

  It wasn’t until much later, when Mum and I were back in England, that I told her more specifically about some of the things that had happened in Athens. What I did tell her and Nikos, though, was that I had been arrested with Christoph and had been too afraid to admit the truth when the judge asked me if I had been trafficked.

  ‘Oh my God, Megan!’ The colour drained out of Mum’s face and I thought she was going to pass out. ‘We saw something about it on the news, didn’t we, Nikos?’ Nikos nodded and closed his eyes. ‘I can’t bear to think about it,’ Mum said. ‘We were sitting here watching the television while you were living a nightmare that was being reported on the news.’

  The next morning, I took the SIM card out of my phone and threw the handset in a bin at the side of the road. I don’t know why I kept the SIM card. I think in some weird, mixed-up way I still had feelings for Christoph and that, despite everything, I was reluctant to cut my last remaining connection with him. It’s difficult to explain, even to myself. But, again, I think it was at least partly because I didn’t want to accept the fact that I had never meant anything to Christoph either. It’s hurtful under any circumstances to have to face the fact that someone you’ve cared about never cared about you. It’s even worse to have to accept that you were nothing more to them than a commodity to be bought, sold and disposed of without a backward glance as soon as you had outgrown your financial usefulness.

  Mum cried when I told her I’d had syphilis; and she was angry when I described how, one day in the car, Christoph had shown me a photograph of her standing laughing in Nikos’s bar and had threatened to kill her if I ever gave him away.

  ‘I wish he had come after me,’ she said. ‘If I had known what he was doing to you, I might have killed him with my own hands. If he thinks I’m afraid of him, he can think again.’ It was nice that Mum wanted to protect me, but if she had known, as I did, what Christoph was capable of, she would have known that if he ever did come looking for us, we wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Although I was taking the tablets they had given me at the hospital, I still jumped at the sound of every backfiring car, banging door and raised voice. I hadn’t realised until I was among people again just how scared I had learned to be. Mum tried to make the few days before I left Greece as pleasant as possible for me, but I felt as though I didn’t fit into normal society anymore. I was ill at ease all the time – when we were buying food in the supermarket, sitting in a café drinking coffee, or walking along the road in broad daylight surrounded by other people. Whatever we were doing, I couldn’t ever rid myself of the feeling that we were being watched and followed.

  I wasn’t just anxious because I was afraid that Christoph would send someone to find me and take me back to Athens. I kept thinking about Jak too. And when I had been staying with Mum and Nikos for three days, I saw him coming out of a local supermarket. Mum and I were weaving our way into the shop between bins of brightly coloured beach balls and racks of postcards, and she didn’t notice him. When he saw me and beckoned me over, I hung back and let her go in without me.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Jak took hold of my hand. ‘I couldn’t contact you. I tried everything.’ He began to cry. ‘I sent people to look for you. What’s been going on, Megan?’

  I don’t know if it was his tears that tipped the balance, or if I would have believed him whatever he had said or done; because I did desperately want what he told me to be true. I was elated at the thought that he had been searching for me and that he hadn’t meant to leave me alone in Athens to be used and abused as a prostitute for all those years. So when he tore off the corner of his newspaper, wrote his phone number on it and held it out to me, I reached out my hand to take it and promised to text him later that day. Then I breathed deeply a few times to try to control my nervous excitement and went into the shop to find Mum.

  Back at the apartment, I asked Nikos to lend me a phone. As soon as I put my SIM card into it, it began to ring. The call was from Christoph’s number, as were all the dozens of other missed calls and texts that came flooding in. I didn’t answer it, of course, and he kept on ringing and sending messages while I was writing a text to Jak. Jak sent a text back to me almost immediately, asking me to meet him half an hour later outside the shop where I had seen him earlier.

  I hadn’t told Mum much about the men who had trafficked me, so I think she understood even less than I did that they were ruthless criminals who made huge sums of money out of buying and selling human beings. If she had known, she would have felt quite differently when I told her I was going to go o
ut for a walk. As it was, I think she saw it as a sign that I was starting to regain some self-confidence and she was pleased.

  I should have told her the truth. The fact that I didn’t must have meant that I knew she would try to stop me. It’s hard to believe when I think about it now that, after everything that had happened to me during the last six years, I had apparently learned almost nothing.

  Chapter 14

  Jak was waiting for me outside the supermarket. He was sitting behind the steering wheel of a brand new car, so I didn’t see him at first, because I had expected him to be on his old motorcycle, or another one like it. He leaned across the front passenger seat and pushed the door open for me, and I sat beside him as he drove along the road that curved down to the sea.

  He stopped at the bottom of the hill and it wasn’t until we had got out of the car that I realised we were looking out across the beach where we used to sit with his friends when I first met him. The sun was quite low in the sky, almost at our eye level, and it looked as though the surface of the water was covered with thousands of tiny, constantly moving mirrors.

  I could hear a motorbike engine in the distance and as it got closer I recognised its distinctive rattling sound. ‘Quick, get back in the car,’ I said urgently to Jak. ‘I can’t be seen with you.’ I was still trying to open the passenger door when Nikos came round the corner on his ancient Mego motorcycle. I ducked down, but I didn’t know whether he had seen me and my heart was racing as Jak sped off along the road away from him.

  ‘You’ll have to take me back to the shop,’ I said. ‘We can’t see each other again. Mum and Nikos blame you for everything that happened to me. I blamed you too, but …’ I didn’t finish the sentence and Jak didn’t seem to notice my hesitation. As he drove me back to the shop, he talked cheerfully about the house he had built for himself – the fulfilment of a long-held ambition, he said, as though it was a dream I had never shared.